Quarterly Report: Fall Book List ‘Strong’

As we have every quarter for the last several, we’re looking at Barnes & Noble’s recent quarterly report to gauge the trends that are impacting the book industry – which books were big over the last few months and what’s expected for the months ahead.

Sales were still down for the 1st quarter ended May 2nd, but not quite as bad as they’ve been in recent quarters. Overall, the decline was -3.5% from a year ago. “Store traffic was down throughout the quarter,” according to CFO Joseph Lombardi.

After scarcely discussing individual titles or authors at all in recent quarters, the Barnes & Noble execs dropped quite a few names this time around.

What follows are insights gleaned from Barnes and Noble CEO Steve Riggio’s comments on the conference call discussing Q1 results.

Riggio highlighted the two new Barnes & Noble Recommends selections Dog on It by Spencer Quinn and Prayers for Sale by Sandra Dallas.

He also had some interesting comments about the Barnes & Noble Recommends program saying that selected titles “often garner 30, 40% as much as 50% market share in initial weeks on sale,” meaning that B&N is responsible for a large chunk of the overall sales of those titles, and furthermore B&N finds “that those books go onto the bestseller lists of other national, local and regional booksellers.”

“Key site improvements” are expected to improve the performance of bn.com in the second half of the year.

After purchasing ebook provider Fictionwise, B&N now says “the implication of a vastly greater amount of content both in our stores and onlineis exciting to us and has inspired us to develop some unique and innovative approaches to the user experience of buying and reading books.” There will be announcements on this later in the year.

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